Ted Polomis is not playing around

Thursday

When Ted Polomis graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 with a degree in illustration, he never could have imagined what direction has art would take.

“I always hated still lifes all through school,” he says.

But when he returned night after night to his Marshfield home after working as a graphic designer at a newspaper and wanted to make art, the darkness would only allow him to paint scenes from photographs.

“It looked like it was bullshit, and it was,” Polomis says. “It was obviously drawn from photographs. It didn’t have any depth to it.”

He pulled two onions — one red and one yellow — from his kitchen, along with a clove of garlic, and became a still life painter. Yet he wasn’t satisfied simply to be painting plants in the amaryllidaceae family. He wanted a subject that was “a serious study, a reflection of the object itself.” And so the 56-year-old artist turned to toys that were built between 1900 and 1960, such as a blue car made of pressed steel by Wayandotte Toys and a Flash Gordon Retro Rocket.

“They’re just great, and they’re still alive today. That’s why I like them. They have an endurance,” Polomis says, adding that most contemporary toys are plastic and break. “What toy made today is going to be around in 100 years? When I see these things that are 100 years old, they’re amazing.”

A solo show of Polomis’ work, “Toy Stories,” opens on Friday at Kobalt Gallery in Provincetown.

The centerpiece of the exhibit, “The Old Tricycle,” is an oil painting that’s 45 by 51 inches large: the same size as the tricycle that stands in his studio. It’s not something he painted traditionally — none of his works are. He paints the background and shadows first before adding objects. He then uses transparent oil glazing in several layers to create depth and bring out the colors. It takes so long, he usually has several paintings going at once. The tricycle looks like a child could climb right on its red seat and start pedaling away — the giant front tire and a blue frame are rail-thin but sturdy.

“It’s an iconic, meditative study of an enduring object,” Polomis says. “I was struck by how simple and seemingly delicate the tricycle is, and yet it has survived through so many generations to patiently await its next owner.”

Though he buys most of the toys that become his subjects on eBay or at yard sales, flea markets or thrift shops, there is one he painted that has always been his own.

“ ‘Water Beatles’ is actually a ‘Yellow Submarine’ toy I had as a kid,” Polomis says. “Press the levers and The Beatles pop out of the hatches. It’s an oil homage to a favorite band and an earlier era.”

He now has hundreds of toys that fill his home studio, but they’re generally not allowed in the rest of the house.

“I don’t play with them or anything. I use them as objects to paint from,” Polomis says. “There are so many in my studio, and it’s only 12 by 12 [feet], so it’s very claustrophobic. Now that I’ve painted them, I should probably get rid of a lot of them.”

One of his favorite pieces, partly because of the way it looks and mostly because of its history, he honors in “Stitch in Time”: a 1914 Singer sewing machine with a hand crank.

“It works perfectly,” he says. “I thought it was such a cool, unique object, until I came to learn that it was actually the most popular sewing machine model ever produced, though its days of being a common household item are now long gone. It’s from a time when little girls had to make their own doll dresses.”

It amazes Polomis to think that the children who played with these toys are now very old or dead, while the items themselves live on — much like memories. His favorite thing about exhibiting the work is when people see a toy that they had and had loved in a painting and get to talking about their childhood.

“It looks at the whole breadth of your life to that moment,” Polomis says.